LITORAL LANDSCAPES AT ARCOmadrid: FLORENCIA BÖHTLINGK WITH HACHE GALERÍA

The proposal brings together paintings by Böhtlingk from the early 2000s to more recent works that deal with the ecosystemic unity around the La Plata and Amazon rivers and that are inscribed in the tradition of the landscape genre that, in Argentina, was resistant to academic and modern models of representation of the environment.

Böhtlingk's painting shows the beauty of the jungle and the coastline and, at the same time, the survival of colonial structures in the extractivist models and the superposition of cultural, ethnic and religious forms in the frontier territories.

Santiago Villanueva about the artist's work: "To say Misiones (province of the Argentinean littoral bordering Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) or to say Río de la Plata in Florencia Böhtlingk's painting is not to refer to a prototypical landscape, but to a situation... also casual. How to link the missionary landscape in Florencia's painting? As an encounter, which in time has, beyond the experiential, an instance of obsession. As it happens with the observation of the life of birds, where spending time and describing is the only way to know things. To know not as an attitude to catch but to learn to be able to link better, to be able to nominate and care. Painting is a passive attitude towards the landscape: learning so that others can learn".

The record of what she sees and lives marks the pulse of the work of Florencia Böhtlingk (Buenos Aires, Argentina) in an arc that embraces landscape, everyday life and militancy. Between that which surprises her, moves her, or simply accompanies her and the surface of the paper or canvas, the artist introduces the question of the forms and colors of experience. The challenges of technique are offered to the viewer in order to state that painting is a physical and thought process.

Böhtlingk draws and sketches constantly: her production maintains the vibration of the immediate. The influx of images in her practice feeds a profuse body of work that, although crossed by diverse themes, appears cohesive. The contemporary dimension is exercised in an active recognition of multiple pictorial traditions, among them, Amazonian painting, Torregarciano's constructivism and the social muralism of the sixties. In her earliest stages Böhtlingk develops works linked to local identifications with surrealism. Later, she deploys numerous watercolors and oil paintings that deal with the ecosystemic unity around the La Plata and Amazon rivers and that are inscribed in that tradition of the landscape genre that, in Argentina, was resistant to the academic and modern models of representation of the environment. Böhtlingk's painting shows the beauty and savagery of the jungle and the coast and, at the same time, the survival of colonial structures in the extractivist models and the superimposition of cultural, ethnic and religious forms in the frontier territories.

The inscription of the human in nature is also thematized in her audiovisual production, where the dimension of speech is introduced in connection with her most recent pictorial series. In the latter, the artist paints the words that surround her to construct and give an account of the sonorous and semantic landscapes that manifest themselves in the missionary bush or in the streets inhabited by the actuality of social movements.